over the rocks and the shore, keeping strictly within the limits of
the boy's domain of beach and shells, of moss and pebbles. The boy's
terror of his father was so great that, like the Lapp, who lives and
dies in his snow, he made a native land of his rocks and his cottage,
and was terrified and uneasy if he passed his frontier.

The duchess, knowing her child was not fitted to find happiness except
in some humble and retired sphere, did not regret the fate that was
thus imposed upon him; she used this enforced vocation to prepare him
for a noble life of study and science, and she brought to the chateau
Pierre de Sebonde as tutor to the future priest. Nevertheless, in
spite of the tonsure imposed by the will of the father, she was
determined that Etienne's education should not be wholly
ecclesiastical, and took pains to secularize it. She employed
Beauvouloir to teach him the mysteries of natural science; she herself
superintended his studies, regulating them according to her child's
strength, and enlivening them by teaching him Italian, and revealing
to him little by little the poetic beauties of that language. While
the duke rode off with Maximilien to the forest and the wild-boars at
the risk of his life, Jeanne wandered with Etienne in the milky way of
Petrarch's sonnets, or the mighty labyrinth of the Divina Comedia.
Nature had endowed the youth, in compensation for his infirmities,
with so melodious a voice that to hear him sing was a constant
delight; his mother taught him music, and their tender, melancholy
songs, accompanied by a mandolin, were the favorite recreation
promised as a reward for some more arduous study required by the Abbe
de Sebonde. Etienne listened to his mother with a passionate
admiration she had never seen except in the eyes of Georges de
Chaverny. The first time the poor woman found a memory of her girlhood
in the long, slow look of her child, she covered him with kisses; and